I wrote about politics in South Korea in August, when I focused on the presidential campaign of Lee Myung-bak, why some people were calling him a "pragmatist," and what that term meant in such a context.
So now, I'm hapy to report, the pragmatist has prevailed.
Mr. Lee won the election this week with a strong plurality. He received 48.7% of the vote in a multiple-candidate field. The runner up, Chung Dong-young, received only 26.2%.
Mr. Chung was seen as the proxy for the incumbent, Roh Moo-hyun, and the electorate was unhappy with the sluggish growth of the last five years under Roh.
Sluggish is a comparative term, of course. Nearby, the Japanese government just announced that its only predicting growth of 2% in its next fiscal year. The growth that makes Koreans so unhappy has been at about 4.5% annual. Still, it was a good deal more than that in pre-Roh years.
Mr. Lee was a natural figure to replace the current leadership under such conditions, as a former executive within the Hyundai corporate empire.
East Asia in general is a crucial economic driver for the world's economy, and South Korea is in the thick of it, so everyone has a special reason, not just distant philanthropic sentiment but a genuine basis in self interest, to wish the best for the people of the half peninsula.
Showing posts with label Lee Myung-bak. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lee Myung-bak. Show all posts
20 December 2007
21 August 2007
Pragmatism in South Korea
A former CEO of Hyundai, Lee Myung-bak, is now running for president of South Korea as a member of the Grand National Party.
Lee calls himself a pragmatist. Indeed, he uses the phrase "empirical pragmatist," which sounds a tad backwards to me, but that may be an artifact of translation. I prefer "pragmatic empiricism" when both terms are used, because pragmatism is a variant within the broader empirical camp.
Lee, at any rate, used "empirical pragmatism" as a label for his desire to get beyond ideologies, which he believes have simply blinded previous governments to the national interest. He also thinks the national interest is best served -- pragmatically advanced, by what he calls the "smart market economy," in which on the one hand competition, freedom and creativity are protected, and on the other hand stragglers are assisted.
I don't know South Korean politics well enough to comment, but I will say as a pragmatist I don't object to Lee's use of the term. In my own mind, as I have long contended, the fullest political expression of pragmatism is anarcho-capitalism. But ....
I recognize that the Republic of Korea is unlikely soil for anarcho-capitalism, largely because the notion of a free-market system for territorial defense leaves people queasy, and with Communism-induced famine so evident just to the north of an arbitrary line on a map, that queasiness is rather hard to overcome. So, pragmatically, I suspect Lee is going as far in what I regard as the rational direction as could be expected of him.
Iceland, after all, in the days sometimes evoked as an anarcho-cap model, or for that matter in all days since, has been ... well, an island. Not the southern half of a peninsula.
Lee calls himself a pragmatist. Indeed, he uses the phrase "empirical pragmatist," which sounds a tad backwards to me, but that may be an artifact of translation. I prefer "pragmatic empiricism" when both terms are used, because pragmatism is a variant within the broader empirical camp.
Lee, at any rate, used "empirical pragmatism" as a label for his desire to get beyond ideologies, which he believes have simply blinded previous governments to the national interest. He also thinks the national interest is best served -- pragmatically advanced, by what he calls the "smart market economy," in which on the one hand competition, freedom and creativity are protected, and on the other hand stragglers are assisted.
I don't know South Korean politics well enough to comment, but I will say as a pragmatist I don't object to Lee's use of the term. In my own mind, as I have long contended, the fullest political expression of pragmatism is anarcho-capitalism. But ....
I recognize that the Republic of Korea is unlikely soil for anarcho-capitalism, largely because the notion of a free-market system for territorial defense leaves people queasy, and with Communism-induced famine so evident just to the north of an arbitrary line on a map, that queasiness is rather hard to overcome. So, pragmatically, I suspect Lee is going as far in what I regard as the rational direction as could be expected of him.
Iceland, after all, in the days sometimes evoked as an anarcho-cap model, or for that matter in all days since, has been ... well, an island. Not the southern half of a peninsula.
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